Bugbear Talisman 9: The Payoff

I’ll be at SPX this weekend! I’m at table F8-F9 with Kel, Shabet, and Magnolia! Come by and see me! It will be my very first east coast convention! I’ll have a collection of my short stories for sale! Look! They’re neat! So come on by! Also, my Kickstarter ends on Saturday! Go get it!

I do recall the characters talking about the change as if it were an illusion, but that can’t be the whole story. If it were a mere illusion, their real bodies would continue to physically interact with their surroundings. It would be noticeable, and even if no one else realized something odd was going on, they themselves would necessarily be conscious of the fact that their bodies are not what they appear to be. I don’t see how it would be possible to reconcile that with Michelle having no idea she wasn’t human until reaching college.

Not sure how it works out but… wasn’t there a similar thing going on in the anime Wolf’s Rain? They weren’t really humans, just illusions of humans – it has been a long time since I watched that show, I don’t remember how the wolf’s in human clothing interacted with everything.

I’m a bit late with this, but…
The medallion magic is an illusion, but it’s a tangible one. It’s sort of like the holo-deck on Star Trek: it’s not made of conventional matter, but it behaves as if it is. So when he’s human he still has fur, but not physically.

I think that if the medallion’s magic can trick the laws of physics into thinking Alec is, like, one eighth his real size, it can make it easier to clean honey off the bits of him that are not hairy in human form.

For the curious, the 1408 references a Stephen King short story, in which a reporter investigates a purportedly haunted hotel room. Seeing as it’s a King story, you might be able to imagine where things go.

And I can see references to a the classic British comedy Rising Damp >:=)> Look at those walls! Anyway, presumably the detective work will begin now, as The Sweeney Kings of Nowhere get on the case of The Pink Prankster. >:=D>

Not really. It was spread pretty evenly over his head – I’ve had 15 pound sacks of things fall on me, and it’s fine. It’s only when it’s one singular object that can bring the entire weight to a single point of contact.

What I really love about these pages is that they display that here we are, sitting here wishing we were gryphons who could fly or bugbears who are awesome or any other number of things, even if you’re a spiffy mythic animal, you can still have that same wish. Grass is always greener, right? She might be a spiffy adorable goat-legged glaistig, but she is intensely into bugbears. Which she will never be.

I think He had it coming, But I would like to watch him come up from behind as the underdog…although make the jerk work for it. Besides. As adorable as she is with her taste in pranks It should not take him to long to track her down.

For some reason, looking at this scene and thinking of the resulting need-to-clean-up aftermath (honey + fur, “shudder”) and how Alec could clean himself, an image of Alec being held down by an especially large, motherly cat and licking him clean keeps popping in my head. With him protesting in vain. (“Mom! Mom, your messing up my mane!”)

Along that same line of thought, it would be totally hilarious if Alec had a nemean lion (or some other mythical feline) girlfriend somewhere…which would make getting cleaned up a completly different order of fun. ^_^

I wouldn’t put it past Alec to find a way to give the metaphorical finger to Lily by turning her prank into something he enjoys.

Of course, until she shows up in the comic, any details about her, including her existence really, is subject to change. Case in point, in that alphabet meme, J is for Jack. He is way paler in that meme than he has been since he showed up in the comic for the first time in Exchanges. Lots of other characters had tweaks to their names, appearances, and backstories between the first art posted of them and their introduction in the comic, too.

It would be funny if one day someone countered one of Alec’s bugbear theories by saying the person in question was a different creature entirely. “H. P. Lovecraft was a nokk. I thought everyone knew that.”

This is literally half a decade and some late, but Lovecraft being a self loathing Nokk would make sense thematically. Nokks are immortal, but go mad and violent at around their 50th birthday. What was one of Lovecrafts most famous books about? A town of half breed humans who are all cultists of a deep sea god thing, who are all hoping to transition into immortal fish monsters and live in the dark, ancient depths of the sea, in cities older than mankind. H.P. Lovecraft died about seven months before his 47th birthday… Would be a rather grim introduction to the story, huh?